Comanche Wars

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The Comanche Wars were a series of armed conflicts fought between Comanche peoples and Spanish, Mexican, and American militaries and civilians in the United States and Mexico from as early as 1706 until at least the mid-1870s. The Comanche were the Native American inhabitants of a large area known as Comancheria, which stretched across much of the southern Great Plains from Colorado and Kansas in the north through Oklahoma, Texas, and eastern New Mexico and into the Mexican state of Chihuahua in the south. For more than 150 years, and bolstered by great horsemanship, the Comanche were the dominant native tribe in the region, known as “the Lords of the Southern Plains”, though they also shared parts of Comancheria with the Wichita, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache and, after 1840, the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho. The value of the Comanche traditional homeland was recognized by European-American colonists seeking to settle the American frontier and quickly brought the two sides into conflict. The Comanche Wars began in 1706 with raids by Comanche warriors on the Spanish colonies of New Spain and continued until the last bands of Comanche surrendered to the United States Army in 1875, although a few Comanche continued to fight in later conflicts such as the Buffalo Hunters' War in 1876 and 1877. The Comanche were noted as fierce combatants who practiced an emphatic resistance to European-American influence and encroachment upon their lands. Comanche power peaked in the 1840s when they conducted large-scale raids hundreds of miles into Mexico proper, while also warring against the Anglo-Americans and Tejanos who had settled in independent Texas. Their power declined as epidemics of cholera and smallpox caused thousands of Comanche deaths and as continuous pressure from the expanding population of the United States forced them to cede most of their tribal lands.